Airlines searches for off season travel grow by 27%: Cleartrip

Lucrative offers and discounts are making off season travelling more popular as there was 27 per cent growth in airline searches for domestic destinations for this monsoon compared to the same period last year, as per online travel agency Cleartrip.

The data is based on searches and bookings on airlines offering discounts from May 2016 to May 2017. (Reuters)

Lucrative offers and discounts are making off season travelling more popular as there was 27 per cent growth in airline searches for domestic destinations for this monsoon compared to the same period last year, as per online travel agency Cleartrip. “The average daily searches for airline bookings grew by 27 per cent for domestic and 15 per cent for international destinations in May 2017, when compared with the sale period in May 2016,” says the data collected by Cleartrip on its platform. The data is based on searches and bookings on airlines offering discounts from May 2016 to May 2017. This year, the travel date window has also been significantly higher in the pre-monsoon sales compared to last year, it said.

“An in-depth look into our data reveals that on an average, the market share for any airline grows by 30 per cent during the sale period, perhaps an important driver of the recurrent airline sales,” Cleartrip’s Chief Marketing Officer Subramanya Sharma told PTI here. “For this year, we see a higher number of airline sales than in the same period in 2016, offering more flexibility in travel dates,” Sharma said. The data revealed that the average daily bookings grew by 48 per cent for domestic and 44 per cent for international flights.

Even as the average fares have gone up by 12 per cent for domestic flights this year, the increased number of airline sales with better travel flexibility have helped the bookings to grow by 48 per cent, Sharma said. Among the domestic destinations, Indore and Ranchi are the new cities that have featured in the top 25 cities list this year. Besides, among the international destinations, Muscat, Melbourne, Dhaka and Los Angeles are the new cities to feature in the top 25 list.